12 Things You Should Know About 12 Years a Slave

1. Already being touted as the Best Picture frontrunner, 12 Years a Slave is the finest movie ever made about slavery in the United States. But I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise. After all, it’s not hard to be better about slavery than Amistad, Django Unchained, or Gone With the Wind—“Lawdy, Miss Scarlett!” What’s hard is to make a movie about “the peculiar institution” (as Southerners euphemistically termed it) that shakes us up and makes us examine it anew.

2. Adapted by John Ridley from a memoir of the same title, Steve McQueen’s film tells the true story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man from Saratoga Springs, New York, who, in 1841, was kidnapped and sold into bondage in Louisiana. McQueen and Ridley don’t waste time making obvious moral points—they know we know that slavery was bad. They’re interested in the business and psychopathology of the slavery system—how it worked, how folks behaved, how it warped owners and slaves alike.

3. The action starts rather boringly—with stilted family scenes in New York and crudely drawn slave owners—and concludes rather conventionally, although it never falls into the sentimental uplift that marred the ending of Schindler’s List. In between, from the moment Paul Dano turns up as a jittery, resentful slave-driver (yes, this fine actor’s been given yet another trademark Paul Dano role), the movie is taut, unsettling, original.

4. Although about American slavery, it was directed by the British-born McQueen and stars the British-born Ejiofor. Its principal slave owners are the German-Irish Michael Fassbender and the British-born Benedict Cumberbatch, and the leading female slave a Mexican-born Kenyan, Lupita Nyong’o. The only American star is Brad Pitt, one of the film’s producers. He has a small role as an abolitionist carpenter—who’s Canadian.

5. Ejiofor gives a deep, sympathetic, marvelously watchable performance as Solomon, who’s both the victimized hero and the audience’s surrogate—one of us. His Solomon not only registers the horror and despair of being shanghaied into nightmarish circumstances, but his obvious decency lets us grasp how easily one becomes implicated in the sick psychology of slavery. Whether doing extra work to win favor with those bosses or writing secret notes about his plight, Solomon learns the complicity and cunning it takes just to survive. Nobody gets to feel clean.

6. Fassbender could hardly be better as Edwin Epps, a cruel plantation owner who truly believes that black people are property. He whips slaves for picking too slowly, regularly violates the lovely slave Patsey (Nyong’o will win awards), and feels pity for—himself. Lurching between maniacal and even more maniacal, Fassbender endows this righteous psycho with terrifying dimension and force. And he makes us understand the nerve-racking reality of capricious power—if Epps wants to talk, you talk; if he wants to kill you, you’re dead. Just depends on his mood.

7. Sex, Part I. Where Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t lay a finger on Kerry Washington in Django Unchained—sexuality is one of Quentin Tarantino’s blind spots—Epps reminds us that plantation owners routinely exercised seigneurial rights over the bodies of their female slaves. McQueen and Fassbender’s last collaboration was about a sex addict. It was titled Shame, although Epps’s twisted passions surely give him far better reason to feel ashamed.

8. If Fassbender is a wicked slave owner, Cumberbatch’s William Ford is a “good” one. This liberal-minded Baptist preacher admires Solomon’s intelligence, feels awful when he’s physically abused, and deep down knows that slavery is wrong. Yet he wouldn’t dream of setting Solomon free because that would mean losing his comfortable way of life. In a recent chat, Ejiofor told me that in some ways, Ford’s hypocrisy actually makes him worse than Epps, who at least believed in what he was doing.

9. You’ll hear that the movie is “violent,” “brutal,” maybe even “torture porn.” It is the first two, but it’s actually far less violent than the jocularly bloodthirsty Django Unchained or countless horror movies. The difference is that, unlike the callow Tarantino, McQueen understands what he’s depicting. He wants us to register what it means in human terms to make a slave stand on tiptoes for hours with a noose around his neck or to whip a woman until the flesh is peeled from her back. The violence in 12 Years a Slave feels so violent because it’s painful, not entertaining.

10. Sex, Part II: It was central to slave-owning ideology that black men were beasts who, given the chance, would ravish white women. Talk about projection. What actually often happened was that white men ravished enslaved black women. Small wonder that Epps’s wife, Mary (a superb Sarah Paulson) comes across so vindictive. Even as her husband claims to be acting in the name of her purity and security, she knows the beautiful Patsey is the one he actually desires.

11. McQueen has always been drawn to raw, volatile material, but in Hunger and Shame he aestheticized the action with such beauty-mad detachment that his style diminished the human meaning. While you’d never call 12 Years a Slave warm, it marks a step forward in empathy. Not that McQueen’s making your usual historical picture or costume drama. Even as he makes us feel sympathy for Solomon and the other slaves, he builds the movie around brilliantly drawn images (slave selling, lynching, mourners singing “Roll, Jordan, Roll”) with the iconic power of genre paintings. In an almost Brechtian way, we see Solomon’s tribulations as both personal and emblematic.

12. Because 12 Years a Slave was insanely overpraised out of Toronto, the backlash began even before it opened. One critic I know faults it for not being as “angry” as Django Unchained, as if rage remains the proper attitude 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. And the Los Angeles Times reports that some Oscar voters feel they’ve already put in enough time with black oppression by seeing The Butler. “I’ve read all about the Civil War and slavery,” one Academy member is quoted as saying. “I don’t need to see a movie repeating what I already know.” That’s funny. I feel the same way about Spider-Man.